Past Exhibitions

Edward Hopper's Women

Nov 13 2008 – Mar 1 2009

Seattle Art Museum

Third Floor Galleries

Edward Hopper's Women focuses on a small interconnected group of paintings that set the course of this artist's successful career as a painter of the modern American scene. At the center of the group is the artist's famous Chop Suey (1929), which is among the very first of Hopper's paintings of the modern urban scene.

Hopper revealed himself an uncommonly close observer of people and places when in the 1920s he studied the interiors of New York restaurants and focused on the young women clientele that typically frequented these places. It was with Chop Suey and related paintings that Hopper found his most potent, enigmatic subject in the American city–the modern American woman. What Hopper created in these early New York paintings was a look at a social dynamic that was reshaping the urban scene–the influx of young women into the modern work-a-day world. The exhibition brings together a group of paintings that shows Chop Suey as a part of an extended narrative of human vulnerability that evolved as Hopper studied women in new kinds of social spaces in New York.

–Patricia Junker, Curator of American Art

An elegant and revealing catalogue, written by Patricia Junker, the Ann M. Barwick Curator of American Art, accompanies the exhibition. It retails for $19.95 and is available at all SAM SHOP locations. SAM members receive a 15% discount.